I am preparing a study of health care and the health professions in France in the first half of the nineteenth century. I regard this period as a crucial one for two related processes: the professionalization of medicine and the medicalization of society. By professionalization of medicine I refer to the largely successful efforts of doctors to assert their claims of authority, based on their superior education, over all empirical practitioners of medicine. By medicalization of society I refer to the acceptance by society of professional services. Neither process was complete in early ninteenth-century France. The struggle was engaged over such issues as whether to permit second-class physicians, with inferior training, to practice medicine in rural districts; whether there was an over-production of medical doctors; whether the government should establish posts for doctors to treat poor patients. In the course of this study I will be using both methods and theoretical concepts borrowed from the social sciences, particularly the methods of quantitative analysis and the theoretical concepts from the sociology of the professions and of medicine. My principal sources will be the archival collections of government and medical institutions and the medical-professional press.